A Memory of A Man
by Sable Supernova
Summary: Lily always loved to paint, and as she grew up, she polished her craft. When the unthinkable happens, it takes her a long time to come to terms with it, but her art is the one thing that gets her through and helps her heal, with help from her brothers. One shot.


**A Memory of a Man**

As a child, Lily loved to paint. She took the old bottles of poster paints out and started out at two years old, playing with colour and making bright splashes across the page. She decided afterwards what they looked like to her, and held them up to her dad proudly, and he always thought they were beautiful. By four, she'd learned how to crudely manipulate the paintbrush to do her bidding. She captured rudimentary representations of the house she was growing up in, the apple tree in Uncle Bill's back garden, Granny Molly's kitchen. She captured her own childish, blissful ignorance in the way the sun always shone and nothing was broken or out of place.

For her ninth birthday, she switched her poster paints for acrylics. Her works now held a whole new dimension, and were beginning to look beautiful in their own right. By thirteen, she'd learned the most important lesson of all: that art didn't have to be beautiful. She didn't have to paint happiness, if she wasn't feeling happy. She had to capture the way she saw the world, whether that was the way her parents still held hands as they walked together down the street, or how the rain fell relentlessly on the roses in the garden of the old lady who lived down the street, bruising the petals, tearing some off, leaving a beautiful carnage in its wake.

Her first love at fifteen had her using watercolours for the first time, in love with their pastel shades and calm edges, like an imprint in sand washed pale by the sea. She liked the juxtaposition between the medium and the city streets at night.

At seventeen, she mixed the two. Watercolour were the backgrounds, the skin tones, the clothes; pale impressions of the truth. Acrylic were the brightness of the eyes and the hard edges of buildings, the blood red of lips.

She washed her paintbrushes in rubbing alcohol at eighteen; packed away her blank canvases; let her finished pieces hang on walls about the house collecting dust. Two pieces, half done, were forgotten in the space between her wardrobe and her wall. Her father died. It was a sudden accident, unexpected, unexplained, and the wizarding world wept with them, but it felt false. They wept The Boy Who Lived, The Chosen One, the greatest hero they'd known. Lily and her remaining family – they mourned The Man Who Loved, The Father And Husband, the man who loved his little girl's paintings, and his first born son's pride in his grades at school, and his middle child's prowess on the Quidditch Pitch. They mourned the man who thought of all of these things as equal, because they were in the eyes of his children, and where they felt strongest was what mattered to him. They mourned the husband who would come home from work with a box of chocolates or a bouquet for his wife, just because he loved her and for no other reason.

James's grades slipped. Albus stopped playing Quidditch. Lily didn't want to paint any longer. None of them knew how to go on without him, for a while.

It took almost a year.

Lily wanted to turn it around.

Albus sat on a stool, his breathing coming heavy as he pulled at the collar of his father's wedding suit. It fit perfectly, but it felt big and loose on him, like he was stepping into the shoes of a man he could never live up to.

Lily stood behind the easel in front of him, pencil in hand, sketching away, trying to remember eternally the way the light from the round attic window hit the navy fabric on his right leg.

"Are we nearly done?" Albus asked, not wanting to rush her – he'd agreed to this, after all – but wanting to put his own clothes back on.

"Half an hour. I'm sorry, I know it's weird. It just… it has to be perfect." Lily replied, pushing her red hair behind her ear with lead-stained fingers.

Albus said nothing. He knew why she'd asked him. He remembered the dark days when the shock settled. He could hardly look at himself in the bathroom mirror to shave. Harry was there in the line of his jaw; in the curve of his nose. He was there in the dark, messy hair on his head that never sat flat. Now Albus had grown a man's figure, Harry was even there in his stature and girth; in the way he held his cutlery at dinner; even in the size and shape of his feet. Harry was everywhere in Albus, and even when the memories were too painful, when all Albus wanted to do was forget the numbness inside of him, he couldn't shake his father's image.

From photographs, images left in her mind's eye and the memory of himself Harry had left in Albus, Lily would paint him, their father, as he was.

Once the sketches were done, and she was ready to paint, Lily would let Albus go and work alone with her heartbreak. She'd chosen to surround herself with her despair for however long this took – Albus didn't need to do that. James knew what they were doing, the secret they were keeping, but he chose to stay away from it. His grief was a private grief, wallowed in alone behind closed doors and not shared, not even with his siblings. James' grief was a grief of forgetting.

Albus and Lily wanted to remember, even if that meant sadness. They hoped that one day, the sadness wouldn't hurt quite so much, and they'd be able to remember and smile.

It took her a month. She worked on it in the evenings, after the working day at the Daily Prophet was done, after her mother had served them dinner and they'd eaten and pretended they were happy and whole and not broken. She stood there for hours at a time until the muscles in her back and legs ached from stiffness and the sun had long since set. She threw two half-painted canvases out.

She captured the colour of his cheeks in watercolour, but the green of his eyes in acrylic. The black of his hair was a cloud of charcoal with white chalk highlights where the sun used to catch it. His suit was watercolour with acrylic folds and creases, oil buttons. The chair was acrylic with charcoal grain and wood marks. The wall was pastels – chalk and oil. She mixed mediums like they were never meant to be apart, like the watercolour was the softness of her father's smile; the chalk pastel was The Man Who Loved. The acrylic was the fierce pride of The Chosen One; the oils were the loyalty and stubbornness of The Boy Who Lived and The Father and Husband. A picture can paint a thousand words and this painting would tell of all the lives her father lived, and how they all came together to make the man, unique as he was.

It took her a month. Ginny was out when she finished, visiting her mother. It was a Sunday afternoon. James and Albus were in the garden together, as they often were as boys, talking Quidditch. Paint on her forehead and streaked through her frazzled hair, she stepped out into the world as if she was seeing it again for the first time, bright and brilliant as it was. She walked up to her brothers who stopped talking as she approached, and stared.

"It's done," she told them, letting out a breathy sigh of relief, but no smile. She expected Albus to come and see, but she was surprised when James solemnly stood to follow their pilgrimage. She lead them upstairs to her attic studio, unlocking the charm on the door that had kept their mother out, and turned the painting around to show them.

They stood and stared, saying nothing.

"It's… it's him," Albus finally choked out.

Tears formed in the siblings' eyes, tears for a father who suddenly, for the first time in a year, was in the room with them, looking down on them with a proud smile.

"Can I do something?" James asked, drawing his wand.

Lily didn't stop for a second to be afraid. She knew this painting was her best work yet, that she'd poured heart and soul into this art that she'd never be able to do again. She'd bled her pain onto the canvas through open veins. She nodded at James' request, allowing him to add the embodiment of his pain to the work, as Albus and Lily already had.

James stepped forward, muttering a complex charm, one Lily and Albus didn't understand until it was complete. The brains his father had always appreciated in him showed their face in the concentration on his brow. He smiled when he was done, and waited.

The man in the portrait moved, a hand raising to ruffle his hair as his smile grew wider, as if he knew what he was a product of, as if he knew his legacy, his children, were stood staring at him with tears of joy.

"We should give it to mum on the anniversary," Albus said, not needing to clarify that he meant the anniversary of their father's death.

Lily nodded. "It should be hers. She should remember him like this."

"It's a memory of him as he was, unapoligetically. Not as the world chooses to see him. It's perfect," James added, unable to think of more words as he looked closer. He let out a breathy laugh as he spotted a minor detail. "The scar on his left cheek. Do you remember, Lils?" he asked.

Albus laughed at the memory. "The Day Lily Got Her First Broomstick. Also known as The Day We Knew Lily Would Never Be A Quidditch Player."

"Hey!" Lily called out in indignation, before the three of them all laughed at the thought, like it was some old joke, and it didn't matter that the one who'd always loved to tell it the most was no longer there to hear it.

* * *

 **AN: Written for the Myths and Legends Class at Hogwarts, for the Norse Creation Myth, Odin and Ymir, for the prompt: Odin, Ve and Vili were brothers who worked together to create the earth. Write about siblings working together to achieve something. 1639 words.**


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